Chuck Norris (and Michael Landon) were golden age role models for young men. Strong but thoughtful, firm but compassionate, and deeply principled but also practical. Yes, these were acting roles but they picked those roles for a reason. Rest in peace, Chuck.
I am not a scholar in general, or of Chuck Norris specifically. I only have the impressions I have from the pop culture I've consumed. Like most people. And for us, Norris represents something wholesome.
For others, those who've read something, or know more, or think they know more, that symbol, that myth, has been ruined. The illusion pierced, the ugly reality revealed. They then look with pity, disdain and contempt at those who still admire the person. Or worse, they make the bad faith argument that to admire him is in fact to embrace those ruinous facts of which most are still ignorant.
Frankly, I think what you're doing is a farce. You're showing the world how smart you are and how dumb everyone else is. Ultimately you're trying to prove how dumb it is to believe in anyone or anything. If you look closely enough you'll find dirt on anyone. There is a contradiction: you claim a moral stance, but your "moral" position degrades the very idea of role models, heroism, and admiration itself. With enough scrutiny, admiration tends to zero.
The reality of the person is irrelevant. What matters is what they mean, what they symbolize, and the kind of archetype they represent. This is of course not true universally; some mythological people are alive, powerful, and dangerous and we cannot afford such kayfabe. But some are harmless and imply no endorsement of their misdeeds. Especially for actors, storytellers, artists, scientists and perhaps a few others we not only CAN afford it, we SHOULD do it, because these role models (or symbols of role models) are what make up the beating heart of a coherent culture.
I choose to admire Chuck Norris, Michael Jackson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Gahndi, Isaac Asimov, even if some deeds of theirs were wicked. I prefer to go through life admiring symbols of people even knowing that these are constructs. To do otherwise is to recognize the futility of admiration, and I choose not to live that way.
That's a lot of words to say "I prefer to ignore the evil that men do if I find them entertaining enough, and I think it's silly that anyone does otherwise."
The Chuck Norris you admire is a figment of your imagination. He was a product created by capitalism. He never actually fought Bruce Lee. He was never really a Texas Ranger. He was never in the real Delta Force. Putting him on the same cultural level as actual leaders who at least fought for something in the real world is risible. Holding such deep admiration for the things he pretended to do that you feel compelled to insult someone's character and intelligence for judging him as a human being is a far less than admirable moral stance.
The reality of the person is not irrelevant, the reality of the person is all that matters at the end of the day.
Reading this thread has definitely sheared off a few of my brain cells seeing people so collectively deluded about Chuck Norris. As you said he was a totality of capitalism, a product wrapped in human skin. He's only truly notable for the jokes people made (myself included) at the dawn of the early internet. As a person, what he actually accomplished is nothing at best and at worst actively damaging to multiple groups that didn't deserve the heat.
The only good thing out of this mess is that the universe felt cosmically aligned to have his death occur on the same day as Mr. Rogers birthday, someone who genuinely did fight for a better world.
>He's only truly notable for the jokes people made (myself included) at the dawn of the early internet. As a person, what he actually accomplished is nothing at best
The Internet has a fairly long memory and a lot of research on topics like this, and it does not agree that Hillary ever tried such a thing. Ample evidence that GOP politicians, including Trump, tried to claim she did. And late in the primary season a few of her supporters made some sounds like that. But nobody has ever found any shred of evidence her campaign made any accusations, or started any rumors.
Whatever the reason, it wasn't because his characters were "openly maga and a homophobe and a transphobe," because they weren't. Bruce Lee movies and Texas Ranger didn't address those issues at all.
And in spite of his flaws, it's possible that he had some good qualities as well, or at least aspired to them. So maybe those other qualities were what he looked for in the characters he played.
Doesn't seem like he aspired all that hard, since instead of expressing empathy for people who weren't like him, he continued to be a bigot in nearly every aspect. But sure, if you were a white cis straight guy I'm sure he was perfectly kind.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become a Faceboot psychosis villain. It's basically the politics version of "Why is everything so cold?"
I think you forget that Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and put in the policy of “Don’t ask don’t tell” and Obama supported it originally.
Of course they both had a change of heart- was it true change or they saw the direction of the political winds? Who knows?
I don’t know Chuck Norris’s views on LGBT. But if he was a self proclaimed “born again Christian” and a rabid Trump supporter, I can only guess. But I no more expect people who were insulted by what he said (which I personally don’t know) to give him more grace or reverence than I do is a Black man who couldn’t give two shits about a dead racist podcaster.
Other people no more need to “contextualize” homophobia than I feel a need to “contextualize” the racism of a dead podcaster.
DADT was a significant improvement over the status quo of "we ask, you tell, and then you get dishonorably discharged". Considering it evidence of homophobia is revisionism. Did it go far enough? No. Was it a good step towards where we wanted to go? Yes.
> It passed both houses of Congress by large, veto-proof majorities. Support was bipartisan, though about a third of the Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate opposed it. Clinton criticized DOMA as "divisive and unnecessary".
Again he still signed it. It’s like Susan Collins who always has “serious misgivings” about things that her fellow Republicans do and then votes the party line anyway trying to stay in her party’s good graces while at the same time not pissing off her liberal constituents
It was gonna be law either way; signing it removed a political weapon from the folks pushing its passage. Arguing this is something Clinton did to gay people is counterfactual.
That’s a really poor excuse to sign on to something that you disagree with. I would not sign a petition for making the “Confederacy Day” law if I lived in Mississippi just because it would become law anyway. You have to stand for something.
Would you think it was okay if Tim Scott signed such a law just so his fellow Republicans couldn’t hold it against him in the primary? Well actually I wouldn’t be surprised if he did…
> I don’t get to praise Chuck Norris because of his anti-racism stances but then dismiss his stances against non straight people.
Sure, but I think it's fair to praise people when they do good things, and criticize them for the bad that they do. That's true fir Chuck Norris, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama... anyone.
Totally agree, though, that it's bullshit to think that having positive views on some issues wipes away the bad.
My charitable interpretation is that it was political winds, but possibly not in the way you're implying.
I do believe that Obama was 100% cool with gay marriage, but believed it was politically foolhardy to admit that publicly and in policy positions, but was able to advocate for his true feelings once the political climate changed. Still not awesome, but understandable from an electoral perspective.
I'm not really sure about Clinton. I would guess he's personally in favor of gay marriage and gays in the military today, but hard to say what his views might have been in the 90s (as I was a teenager at the time who wasn't all that interested in politics).
Also on supposedly-liberal people doing homophobic things: let's also not forget that California voters banned gay marriage statewide in 2008. 2008! And this was a ballot measure where all voters got a say, not something passed by the legislature.
Half the country didn't vote for Trump. Not quite 2/3rds of the voting eligible people in the country voted to begin with, and not even half of those people voted for Trump.
Less than 1/3rd of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Not all people that voted for Trump consider themselves Republicans, much less MAGA, when MAGA is only 50-60% of Republicans.
So in reality less than 1/6th of the US voting-eligible population is MAGA. Not half.
And that was at the election - roughly 20% of Trump voters now openly profess regret in voting for him, though I don't think we have data breaking that down as self-proclaimed MAGA vs. otherwise. I suspect if you were not self-proclaimed MAGA you're more likely to be open to regret, but I'm sure at least some of them were MAGA.
Unless poll after poll is contacting and registering answers from 100% of people in the country, that's only 35-40% of the people who answered the poll, which is a much, much smaller number.
None of that changes the fact that the statement that half the country is MAGA because half the country voted for Trump is untrue.
Significantly less than half the country voted for Trump. This is objective fact.
Significantly less than 100% of Trump voters identify as MAGA. This is objective fact.
Approving of Trump as President is also not the same thing as being MAGA, though the overlap is quite likely reasonably high at this point.
You can make an argument that there are more MAGA people than I estimated, but the argument I was referring to was basing it all off of voters for the 2024 election. If you want to make a different argument, we can look at it on its merits.
I gave an analogy earlier that if you have 10 friends and asked them where they wanted to eat dinner and six said let’s get Italian and the other 4 said “Let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, you still have a shitty friend group.
If 40% of the country still supports everything that’s going on, that tells you a lot about this country. Especially seeing that because of the 2 Senators per state regardless of population, gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college, they have outsized influence on the government.
Exactly how can you approve of what Trump is doing and not be MAGA?
A surprising amount of people are single issue voters and will vote for and support someone that supports that single issue. They might not care at all about the entire rest of the issues at all as long as their single issue is fine, and a lot of those single issues, like guns, long predate maga or the tea party.
I'm not saying that makes them good people, I'm just saying I don't think it's the same thing as maga.
2 senators per state isn't really the issue, but the cap on the house is. The senate was built to be population independent, and the house was built specifically to be population dependent, where yes if you had more people you had more power. Then they... voted to cap it, because it was going to give too much power to states with more people. Dumb. EV also tied to the house, so uncapping it unfucks a lot of that, too.
The Senate though also decided the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thats the major issue - especially the Supreme Court.
To your other point, I’ve met some Bush/Romney type Republicans who hold their nose and voted for Trump because the Democrats did go to far on social issues and I say that as a Black guy.
When I was at BigTech in 2020 I thought all of the videos we had to watch on “micro aggressions”, continue announcements on “ally programs”, “Latinx” instead of Latino/Latina (that every single Latino person I spoke to thought was ridiculous), the “how do we feel” meetings about Floyd, and the kind of liberals I met when I flew out to Seattle and other west coast offices (I worked remotely the entire time) were just weird. Not to mention being chastised if you didn’t put your preferred pronouns under your name.
Part of the problem is we changed the senate selections to votes. Originally state legislature picked their senators. That's an amendment that I think is a mistake and should be reverted.
The different chambers are supposed to represent different interests and instead we've made both halves of congress effectively the same thing.
There's deeper rot with the system besides these things - like the apparent lack of safeguards against the executive branch just... ignoring everything, including sometimes even the supreme court... but I don't think the framer's original intentions for the house and senate are fundamentally incorrect.
How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.
You're looking at how things are now with a situation totally fucked from the things being set up to be totally fucked for decades.
The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a fundamental disconnect between how they are selected, how that power balance lies, and what their intended purpose is.
The House is supposed to represent the people. That's the job. Being answerable to their constituents makes sense. The Senate is supposed to represent the States - including as long-lasting entities that will exist before and after the current constituents. The legislature selected them because they were supposed to be more knowledgeable about the issues pertaining to the state, etc. They were to be tasked with doing the necessary thing and not necessarily the popular thing - people can always vote out the state legislature if the senators truly are hated, but having some insulation from the ever changing whims of the general public was a feature.
A lot of the rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric around the electoral college - preventing humans, which can be very dumb en masse, from doing dumb things. That has obviously not been the case, since unfaithful electors just haven't been a thing in quantities that have mattered, but I would argue that when we have found that things didn't work the way the founders intended, the correct option would generally be to make them work the way the founders intended and then only move away from that if we find that it doesn't work. Instead, we've frequently moved away from those things even when they were working.
Gerrymandering is an issue that doesn't have to exist either - it already doesn't in some states, and there's no reason it couldn't be implemented in all of them in this scenario where we're just wholesale changing how the government works.
You’ll have to forgive me as a Black guy whose still living parents grew up in the segregated South and seeing that four of the southern states still consider “Confederacy Memorial Day” a state holiday and two others combine “Confederacy Day” with MLK day for not trusting the good will of the state governments - especially with gerrymandering.
If enough people in any state are bad actors then no solution under democracy is going to resolve the issue without moving away from a system that invests so much power in the states.
But then if enough people in the overall country are bad actors you're back to square one.
I don't have any proposals on how to fix some people just deciding they want to be shitty people. But all of this discussion involves a significant amount of hand waving solutions into place - discussions on getting them implemented, the likelihood of that happening, etc., are all separate and not anything we've talked about from any of the positions.
I am only arguing that state legislatures can gerrymander districts that give them more votes than the population voted for. But it is really hard to gerrymander an entire state and split it up so two Senators can win of their preferred party.
Would GA have two Democratic Senators with a Republican control state government? On the other hand would Susan Collins be a Senator from Maine?
Given the choice of trusting the people of Mississippi to do the right thing and the electorate of the US to do the right thing. The entire US has been more on the side of the angels than the southern states - yes that’s a very low bar.
It's easier (or as easy) to change gerrymandering as it is to change the senate back to it's intended purpose. If you want to argue that an amendment to make gerrymandering unconstitutional should be a prerequisite to returning to state legislatures selecting senators, I'm fine with that - because it's also a much more likely amendment to pass. A big chunk of Americans dislike gerrymandering. Only a tiny fraction of Americans know or care about the different chambers of Congress being intended to serve very different purposes.
Well he was against gay marriage and against the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay kids.
If I have 10 friends and ask them all where they want to eat for dinner and 6 said let’s go to this nice Italian spot and the other 4 said “let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, that still means I have a shitty friend group.
It's more like 3 say "let's get Italian", 3 say "let's get Mexican", 3 say "I'm not hungry", and 1 says "let's kill Ralph, and eat him seasoned with Italian spices". Then the first 3 say "great idea!".
I'm not american but I see technically nothing wrong with MAGA for me. it doesn't mean you must be transphobe or homophobe etc. but what people do under MAGA is another thing. sometimes it feels like for them it means "run america into the ground" or "get rid of all the best about america". GRABA if you like
Being maga is diametrically opposed to supporting your country, as we've seen in particular this time around, but was also clearly visible in 2016-2020.
Rampant abuse of the legal system to target individuals, despite claiming (without evidence) that that was that the Democrats did against them
Total disregard for the constitution
Threats towards the judiciary
A million other things that I can list - but I'm sure you've heard them all and just don't care, so there's probably not much use in me continuing.
The entire point of MAGA is that they see “their country” as one where uppity negroes like Obama should have known his place, it’s DEI whenever a minority has a position of influence and power yet they keep lowering the standards for both ICE and the DOJ and RFK JR with no medical knowledge is the head of HHS.
America won’t be “great” until minorities, non Christians and non straight people know their role.
To believe in "Make America Great Again" you have to believe that America is not great, and this implies you are ashamed of your country. Shame is built in to MAGA.
Those points are fine, but not the root of what makes MAGA shameful. You can go about having that opinion and take actions towards it without being racist, anti-LGBT, generally hateful, and backing an administration that has been proven time and time again to be deceitful in every facet and tuned to the interest of the wealthiest.
You have a very narrow and rose colored view of what maga is. To us living in the US, maga stands for pedophilia, misogyny, racism, fascism, homophobia, transphobia, corroption and much more.
It absolutely has nothing to do with putting america first, it has everything to do with putting trump first. Im afraid you have made the mistake of listening to a politicians words instead of watching his actions. Every word from his mouth is a lie.
I know he's a liar. He is probably mentally ill and definitely not very bright. But I was not talking about Donald Trump. I was talking about the principle of wanting to make one's country "great."
> To us living in the US maga stands for...
This is not true. The GOP won the popular vote, centrists see some advantages in MAGA, and even some Democrats are against MAGA without going to the extreme of painting them all as pedophiles and corrupt.
Just out of curiosity, could you (or anyone else) give a couple of examples of what you would consider "great role models for real men"? Or "good role models for well-adapted men", if you'd rather use less inflammatory language.
I think Cavill has a fair point - I generally support MeToo, think it was very important, but I can understand how being a fairly big name in Hollywood can result in hesitation around pursuing women. Especially now that he's got a lot of power for a whole franchise, with the Warhammer 40k stuff.
Steve Irwin I don't think what he did was a particularly big deal with the kid.
I don't really like celebrities as role models though. They have to have public personas as a matter of course. I would instead try to point to specific behaviors from real people. I also don't think people have to be perfect. But I do think there are some deal breakers that would mean I would never point my kids towards them as a role model. Racism and homophobia are among those things. I think believing that whole classifications of people are lesser is disqualifying.
Oh I think all of those guys have fair points. I was trying to illustrate how you could make a hero or a villain out of anybody if you cherry pick incidents, decisions or opinions.
Just like the parent comment was trying to do with Chuck Norris. (Which was probably way worse than any of these examples)
Ironically, the very concept of a “real man” is founded on the idea that a man should be defined by stereotypes rather than by sex, which puts manosphere enthusiasts and gender enthusiasts in closer epistemological proximity than either would care to admit.
I meant male role models for men (I'm sure you could find one). Not every man aspires to be the mother of 7 and go to the gym. (Because: remember that gyms are classist by design. [1])
But maybe lets talk about how Amy got called out by The Human Rights Campaign and 185 LGBTQ organizations for her "disturbingly anti-LGBTQ past writings, rhetoric and association with extremist groups." [2]
Or how about when The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights described her record as "fundamentally cruel," arguing she frequently sides with corporations over individuals and shows hostility toward established precedents like the Affordable Care Act.
At least Chuck Norris had no real impact on policy with his bigotry.
Why does a role model for a man have to be a man? Besides, she's an exceptionally good role model even for traditionalist views of what makes a man, by virtue of being so accomplished in her career and still making time for family and health. Her record poses the question: what's your excuse? Men who are all-in on hyperfocus should wither before her.
Sure, there are people that hate her. Her own patron, our Dear Leader, probably hates her when she rules against his interests. All the more reason to respect her.
In this context, a "real man" is probably someone who conforms to the traditional role of a male (physically strong, emotionally restrained, a provider and protector of women, children, and weaker men, etc.).
Of course, "real men" can be just the opposite, depending on who you ask. So, it's really a subjective issue.
I don't think every man should be like that, but I also don't think any of those qualities are bad. In fact, I think they're pretty admirable.
Do you have issues with the fact that some men conform to that type?
Being physically strong is a good thing, and regular resistance training is a huge gap for overall health for quite a lot of people today - men and women.
Being able to provide for someone is an admirable quality, man or woman
Same for being able to protect someone.
I don't think being emotionally restrained is a good thing - and I say this as someone who was raised to be emotionally restrained. I've had to specifically work as an adult to be less emotionally restrained. I think there's a very wide gap between being emotionally restrained and letting emotions rule over you.
Imagine having a lot of people you once admired and looked up to as role models, from actors all the way to even your parents, suddenly all within a decade or so take their masks off and reveal that they are actually villains.
I don’t think this is about nit picking some small detail that causes them to fail a quality/belief checklist. It’s not like finding out your hero picks his nose or doesn’t like chocolate ice cream. When someone goes mask-off as MAGA, they are revealing fundamental core beliefs and values that totally flip the kind of person you might have thought they were.
I have friends and family who I never thought had a hateful, cruel, or belligerent bone in their bodies, suddenly start acting like totally different people, in the span of a few years. This isn’t me holding them to some purity checklist!
It's an object lesson on how certain historical things happened. We go, oh no how could those people have all been inhuman monsters? If only we understood what made them like that.
Agreed. Additionally, when someone says something latently bigoted or hateful, it's easy to just let it slide because we all have our failings and societal progress is slow. Whereas maggotry is about openly embracing those failings, taking on additional types of failings from other people, and then socially validating it all as a purported political movement. But the only real thing tying it together is frustration with the world culminating in lashing out, which is why when they get into power there are no actual constructive policies in any political framework [0]. (apart from lining the preachers' pockets of course, and now apparently a holy war)
nit: I wouldn't call it "mask off" though, as if it's been there the whole time. I'd say it's more like there is tiny a kernel of that (and let's be honest, who doesn't have this in some form or another?), combined with a lack of willpower and critical thinking, that causes them into give in to the siren song of easy answers from mass-personalized propaganda.
[0] ancap and religious fundamentalism are the only frameworks I've been able to find that fit the maggot movement, and they're not particularly constructive.
Fred Rogers was the same kind, thoughtful person in everyday life as he was when he acted on his show. You can watch the congressional tapes of him testifying on increased funding to PBS and also testifying on not making VCRs illegal.
That's a little bit of a false dichotomy, though. I agree that it would be rare, even impossible, to find people who match every quality I imagined they had.
But some of those failings are forgivable, others are not.
Getting genuinely confused about pronouns sometimes: forgivable.
Being a loud, public MAGA homophobe transphobe: not forgivable.
I stopped being a Chuck Norris fan when I learned he was a frequent contributor to WorldNetDaily, that he actively campaigned against gay marriage, and that he advocated for the theory that Obama was not born in America and saying shit like 'Electing Obama will plunge America into a thousand years of darkness.'
Him liking Trump was a symptom of his regressive, homophobic, and racist beliefs.
I hear you and it is sad Norris had the views he did.
BUT, I was in karate as a kid in the prime of his sponsorship of tournaments, and he was indeed a role model then. He was a good guy in that field, promoting martial arts and the discipline, fitness and respect that goes along with it. I can vouch that having him promote hard work, training and respect in martial arts at age 10 did not turn me into a Christian nationalist.
I love that both my post truthfully describing Chuck Norris’s abhorrent views and the reply expressing regret that my post was flagged have now both been flagged. Stay classy, HN.
Remember the good ol' days when people just didn't discuss politics or religion out of decency? There was a reason for that, both bring out the worst in people.
Suddenly I'm reminded of the decent (grown) people who yelled in six year-old Ruby Bridges' face when she was merely attending elementary school. So if that was 1960, I'm just wondering when those good ol' days you're referring to where.
The problem is that living life is inherently political. Being able to ignore politics, not having to feel the need to discuss them, is a sign that you are inherently better off than a good chunk of this country.
A lot of people spend most of their waking hours having to deal with or at least keep in mind the fall out from regressive politics. Asking people to not discuss politics is like asking someone living in fear for their safety to not try and improve said safety. You're asking to not have to be bothered by something that annoys you to talk about in exchange for someone not being able to advocate for their life and livelihood.
I agree with the sentiment. My point was more people used to have a common understanding that there was a time and place for political (and religious) discussion - and that those beliefs were deeply personal, shaped largely by experience, and not meant to be held against one another in the broader judgement of their character.
Somewhere along the way we lost that idea, not all cultural changes are for the better.
I see, so from this reply I gather that your parent post was not “just an expression” as you claimed elsewhere, and you just got snippy when someone pushed back against your obviously out-of-touch assertion of fact.
Despite how much they would have you believe it, human rights are not a political issue. Politics are used to expand practiced rights (or abused to reduce them), just like politics are involved with providing you access to water.
For a simple political disagreement? Absolutely; I completely agree. But to believe that a certain class of people shouldn’t exist is not a run of the mill political belief, and treating it that way normalizes the behavior and contributes to the problem.
Not sure why you're downvoted. The disagreement was not on tax policy or where to build what. I don't understand why both this and "some people shouldn't exist" are both labeled with the same word "political".
Sorry you don’t get to say “Well this person doesn’t think I have the right to exist and be respected as a person. But I’m sure glad he saved a puppy once.”
The feedback loop for this moral hazard is slow but implacable. You can treat the zeitgeist as a dumping ground for so long, until you get so big, that you can no longer treat it like an idealized infinite substance.
Yes, and here's an interesting (and clear) example that shows that narcissism is a complex delusion that puts one's own fault squarely into a blind spot that cannot be perceived. I watched this and, for the first time in my life, felt a huge pang of compassion and sadness for those that suffer from it, even though they make life more difficult for everyone else. They are broken.
A Kent State professor calls 911 because she can't get into her building to pee; she is clearly drunk; they give her every opportunity to get a ride home; she refuses and is eventually detained. Later she goes to the police department to get an apology from the officers involved. It was, to me, a shocking example of the narcissistic delusion, with stakes low-enough that one could focus on that and not the side-effects.
I find this kind of argument tiresome. If indeed you confidently know that a claim is fear mongering in bad faith, then the onus is on you to support your claims. Otherwise you're just adding to the noise. To wit, a perfectly reasonable response to you would be, "just another ignoramus claiming the result of a study is bad-faith fear-mongering without evidence". Or, another way to put it, is that precisely the same sentiment you express about the OP can be expressed about you, and the fact that you don't anticipate that makes your comment inherently suspicious to me.
BTW I don't know anything about the subject, so I mainly look for internal consistency and specific, accurate factual claims as evidence for credibility.
My comment about engagement farming wasn't directed to the OP but rather the groups publishing and funding such studies. Perhaps that's not even really the right term, but clout chasing also doesn't fit and I can't think of much else to describe it presently.
I'd much rather they focus their energy on the more ubiquitous sources of exposure to endocrine disrupting materials in our environment (plastic packaging, plastic bottles, can linings, mattresses and clothing for example).
There's no harm in sharing information and any awareness gained is always worthwhile. We're all free to draw our own conclusions at that point.
You forgot one: capital cannot be held accountable for making a tool used in a crime. It is a simple generalization of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), passed in 2005, which largely bars civil lawsuits against gun makers and sellers when their products are later used in crime.
I'm sorry you're under the impression that a ring means anything except you saying "I bet you half my stuff we stay together". You are under no legal or moral obligation to continue to labor on your ex's behalf for the rest of your life. The fallout from a breakup is each individual's responsibility.
Completely agree. One issue that I never hear mentioned is how disconnected parents become from their child's progress when there are no more paper books. It used to be that you'd progress from start to finish of a book over a term, and a parent could, at a glance, see what you should know and what you're about to learn. Now kids don't get books (which I think would surprise many parents and non-parents alike). Parents literally don't know what their child is learning at any point in time without asking them, and that is unreliable to say the least. Computers in school was supposed to be "an experiment" but everyone has decided, without proof, that it's great and therefore more screens in schools is great. Maybe in the 80's and 90's having computer knowledge was a valid shibboleth for "being smart" but it hasn't been true for 30 years. "Computer knowledge" has displaced "knowledge" in a zero-sum fashion, and it's getting worse.
My son is in the "gifted" program at his school which means they sit him down for 3 extra hours to play the Pokemon rip-off with trivia interspersed called "Prodigy". The public school system is in an unenviable state, being the fulcrum of vast societal forces and disagreements with the highest possible stakes. The districts are terrified of parents starting litigation against the school for any reason, which is why many of them have rules against ALL teacher physical contact with students, including holding the hand of pre-K, K and first graders, including stopping fights. They're supposed to tell the child no, and in the case of fights, distance themselves and call the police. In elementary school, there are no books, no teaching of handwriting, and 30 minutes of recess a day - if they're lucky. If they misbehave, taking away recess is the teacher's recourse.
Plus of course the schools are locked down like prisons, they have "code red" shooter drills once a month, every teacher has a panic button around their neck. No-one walks or rides their bike (at least not in elementary school). All of this is new, all of it is bad, and for some reason no-one seems to notice. I think it's in part that the kids don't know any different, so for them this all seems normal. Those of us having kids recently are shocked at all the changes, shocked that they've happened so quickly, and so silently.
In the schools here kids don't even get the marked up test results to take home any more. So they get some mark but they have no idea what they did wrong and I can't help them without making my own tests and seeing how they are doing.
It's maddening how all this digitization is just a way to collapse the complexity of running an education system into a black box that can not be inspected.
At least the school shooting angle isn't a real problem here.
It's not just about the words. It's the physical book, read and emoted by you, to them, while you are holding them, feeling their warmth, hearing their breath soften as they grow sleepy and fall asleep. It's a thing that you can read again and again, and even something they may remember or talk about with friends in the future. Consider whether it's a good idea to replace Goodnight Moon or Bear Snores On (particularly good to sing or chant) with something like this. I can see this being a viable option for people who can't afford physical children's books, sort of like how I see screen controls as a viable option for people who can't afford tactile, mechanical controls. The perception is wrong about this stuff. It's not better, it's not putting your energy where it is best spent, and frankly I don't trust a Young Lady's Illustrative Primer to raise my kids even for a second.
>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.
We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.
NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?
Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.
Actually: There’s been a noticeable uptick in the last decade+ of better-made clothing for shoppers who are open to paying somewhat higher prices. Not boutique prices, but also more expensive than H&M.
For a long time the stereotypical “young professional” look was tied closely to just a few mainstream retailers (Banana Republic for example), but over the last ~15 years a wider range of smaller or more specialized brands has entered the space: Alex Mill, Spier and Mackay, etc.
But even ignoring that your analogy doesn’t quite fit since price plays a significant role in clothing purchasing decisions: Fast fashion succeeds largely because it is cheap.
If reasonably priced, higher-quality alternatives were accessible people would buy them. It’s partly why certain brands have grown in popularity (Carhartt, for example).
Yeah it actually did do this for me. I will not purchase new clothing at all unless I have some understanding of the supply chain and where it was made, with a strong preference for clothes that are at least cut and sewn in the US. I won’t tolerate buying clothes, or really any textile product, if I can’t be relatively certain it will last me at least five years. A flood of cheap, unreliable shit did actually make me more discerning.
N of 1, obviously, but this isn’t as outlandish as you wanted to make it seem here.
I’m not denying this has been the case for some people. I myself have switched to pretty much exclusively wearing trousers from my favourite tiny brand that cuts and sews them <100km from where I live, and I’m privileged enough to always try to choose quality over price. But quality products have been getting much harder to find in the past years, and I was under the impression we're mostly outliers.
Looking at my family and friend group’s spending habits, it feels like everything is purchased either from Temu or from one of those super-low-price-super-low-quality stores that have been taking Europe by storm these past couple years (i.e. Action, Tedi, Pepco). It’s kinda maddening.
Exactly - it turns into a market for lemons, where the customer is unwilling to make a bet or even invest in an evaluation if there's an overwhelming amount of crap and little ability to differentiate. Amazon is turning into this with QWENFOING everything.
> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning.
Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]?
I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff?
You may be right about taste, but I think it takes a different dimension in the future.
"Dear Claude, please make me a clone of <fancy new saas> but make <these changes specific to my tastes>".
For many things, it's probably not "select the one of 100 that fits my taste", it's probably going to be to just make your own personal version that fits your taste in the first place. And, probably, never share that anywhere.
It already happened mostly outside the AI slop; only if you have marketing money you will succeed and your clients usually cannot distinguish bad from good; if you have VC money and 1B$ valuation you must be doing something right no?
I walk into products being garbage and basically broken (upgrade bottom doesn't work, email always broken, support form goes to dev null etc) and most products I try are b2b and many are enterprise SaaS.
Only yesterday, I am in the EU, I wanted to try out some enterprise software of a company with VC money valuated at billions, so I signed up for a demo which needed me to validate my email. But that email didn't arrive. I tried with 4 different addresses (different providers including google and ms): nothing. So I forgot about it and went on with my day; hours later, 1 hour after the west coast US woke up, I got all 4 emails with expired links. So I guess while sleeping, their system was broken. No worries, things happen, but they happen all the time and it doesn't matter how much money they have. They also often just refuse to fix things because why would they.
I threw out Canva because they refuse to fix fundamental issues and keep blaming the customers or play dumb 'oh we never saw this happen!' while you can just do a search and find heaps of people having the same issues. etc. Quality does not matter, at all. Deep marketing pockets do.
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
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